Games Traitors Play

57

There was a queue of people waiting to enter the Meenakshi temple by the east gate. A female police officer checked the women, frisking their saris with a lollipop-shaped metal detector, while a male officer did the same with the men. No one was wearing any shoes, not even the police. Marchant and Meena had left theirs around the corner at a stall with thousands of others, not expecting to see them again.

Marchant approached the policeman and stood with his arms out and legs apart. Security seemed to be tight today, he sensed — thorough rather than a gesture — and he wondered if the temple was on a heightened state of alert. It wouldn’t have anything to do with Salim Dhar’s mother, but it might make things more difficult when they lifted her. They had already had to abandon their plan of using their wires in the temple, as they would have been picked up by the police detectors.

He smiled at the policeman once he was done and walked on, waiting for Meena at the bottom of the stone steps. He couldn’t be certain, but he thought he detected a slight hostility towards her from the female officer, who glanced over at him as she frisked her. Meena had daubed her hair parting with vermilion, a sign of marriage, but she couldn’t do much about the colour of Marchant’s skin. Perhaps mixed-race marriages didn’t play well in Madurai.

‘Sometimes I remember why we left this country,’ Meena said as she joined him. They walked down a colourful colonnade of pillars, leaving the sunlight behind them. Marchant thought he heard the sound of hesitant slokas being recited in a distant classroom. In front of them he could make out the profile of an elephant, its head almost touching the ornate roof, from which carved lions looked down. A queue of worshippers was waiting to be blessed by the animal. In return for a banana, bought from the elephant’s mahout, it would raise its trunk and touch their heads.

Before they had entered the temple complex, the CIA officer from Chennai had given Meena an update, in between shooting a tourist video of devotees queuing up to smash coconuts before entering the temple.

‘It’s kind of quaint, isn’t it?’ he had said. ‘Signifies leaving one’s identity behind.’

Marchant wasn’t sure if the American was playing his legend or being himself. He showed them a video he had shot earlier of a Russian behaving erratically outside the east entrance. Marchant recognised the tall figure as Valentin.

They walked further inside the temple complex, the light fading until all Marchant could see were pillared halls and corridors disappearing off into the darkness in all directions. In every corner there seemed to be small shrines to Hindu deities, like tiny puppet theatres, the gods visible deep within dark recesses, their bright colours lit by flickering oil candles. Stone sculptures of animals with lions’ bodies and elephants’ heads reared out of the shadows. A man wearing only a lunghi around his waist was lying prostrate, hands in prayer above his head, in front of a statue of Ganesh. They stepped around him and walked on, passing briefly through a courtyard where three camels were tethered. All around them, Hindu prayers were being chanted over a loudspeaker system, the priests’ voices distorting at full volume.

‘I told you it’s another world,’ Meena said, stopping beside a pillar encrusted with what seemed like centuries of crumbling red turmeric powder and candle wax. ‘This is Lakshmi, my goddess,’ she added, looking at an idol of a benign woman with four arms. Its surface was also streaked with yellows and reds, and weathered by generations of worship. ‘The goddess of wealth and fortune, courage and wisdom.’

‘And beauty,’ Marchant added, looking at the lotus flower the goddess was sitting on. He thought back to the Lotus Temple in Delhi, where Leila had been killed. Her lips had still been warm as she had lain lifeless in his arms, her hair sticky with blood. He watched Meena daub some red on her forehead and bow in front of the statue. For a moment, she seemed genuinely at peace. Then she turned to a man standing behind a trestle table beside the idol. On it were tumbling garlands of white jasmine, coconuts and pyramids of turmeric. She gave him a few rupees and picked up a garland. At the same time, they exchanged a few words, too quietly for Marchant or anyone else to hear. Then she placed the fragrant flowers around Lakshmi’s neck, turned back to the table and dabbed her finger in the turmeric.

‘Come on, Indian boy,’ she said, smudging a tilak on Marchant’s forehead and walking on. ‘She’s here.’

A moment later, she pulled him back from the main thoroughfare, just as a white cow came running out of the shadows, draped in a gold-embroidered cloak and accompanied by two breathless temple priests. The tips of the cow’s horns had been painted red and green, and two drums had been strapped to its back, one on either side. The priests, chests bare and glistening with oil, were beating the drums, accompanied by the jangling silver bells that swung from the cow’s neck.

After the cow had gone, Marchant and Meena headed towards Shiva’s shrine, walking through a thriving market of brightly lit shops selling souvenirs and incense that hung heavily in the air. Further on, they passed the Golden Lotus Pond, a bathing pool on the stepped sides of which pilgrims and worshippers washed and chatted. Marchant was alert now, his senses heightened, on the lookout for other agencies. Because Meena was leading the operation to find Dhar’s mother, he had been momentarily entranced by the temple’s sights and sounds, let them carry him back to his childhood in Delhi.

Their plan was a simple one. If Meena’s colleagues were right, Dhar’s mother, Shushma, was selling devotional candles in the hall outside the Shrine of Lord Sundareswarar, Shiva himself. She had been there for the past two days, making the small clay pots at night and filling them with ghee, or clarified butter, and wicks during the day. The CIA had not wanted to alert the Indian authorities to her whereabouts, preferring to interview her in the West, so Meena could not call on local police support. And the temple surrounds made it impossible to seize her against her will, even if she was sedated. Instead, the operation would be low-key and discreet, not words Langley was familiar with; but this was Meena’s job, and she had insisted on it.

Marchant would strike up a conversation with Shushma in his rusty Hindi, explaining who he was and that she was in danger. Better to come with him back to Britain, where waterboarding was still off the menu, than be seized by the CIA. After he had walked her out of the temple complex, they would drive her to a disused airfield east of Madurai where Meena had arranged for a plane to take her to the UK.

It was a risk, but there weren’t many options. Legoland’s profilers had given Marchant a brief psychological assessment of Shushma, which he’d read on the plane. Their conclusion was that she was on her own, abandoned by her husband and wanted by the authorities, and that the thought of being protected by Daniel Marchant, son of the man whom she had once loved and who had financially supported her, would prove sufficiently comforting for her to cooperate.

Marchant wasn’t so sure as he passed a small statue of Hanuman the monkey god — covered in ghee and worn smooth with endless touching — and then turned into the hall that led to Shiva’s shrine. Ahead of him was an imposing icon of Nandi, Shiva’s bull. As a non-Hindu, this was as far as he was allowed to go. Several foreign tourists had entered the hall at the same time as him, one of them peering into the shrine to try to get a glimpse of the holy shivalingam that lay within. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted another foreigner moving away in the darkness, disappearing beyond a statue that he recognised as Nataraja, Shiva as lord of the dance. His father had always kept a small bronze one beside his bed.

Marchant looked again at where the foreigner had been standing, and saw that Meena had clocked him too. She nodded in the direction of the shrine entrance and then moved towards Nataraja. The deal was that he would focus on Shushma while she dealt with any outside interest. He joined a queue of people waiting to collect their ghee candles and enter the shrine. It wasn’t easy in the darkness, but he caught a glimpse of the woman who was handing out the candles to the devotees. She had shaved her head and was wearing a threadbare kurta. Outside the temple complex she could have been mistaken for a beggar.

As he drew near to the front of the queue, Marchant glanced behind him, but he couldn’t see Meena. He was on his own, just how he preferred it. As far as he could tell, the people around him needn’t give him any cause for alarm. His only worry was the priest up ahead at the shrine entrance. The chatty couple in front had travelled from Bangalore, and the extended family immediately behind him were from Chennai. Both had expressed their friendly concern that he wouldn’t be permitted to enter the shrine for darshan.

‘The priests, they are very strict about this sort of thing, you know,’ the man from Bangalore had said. But Marchant had reassured them, explaining that he was just there for the atmosphere. In the darkness, he had calculated that he wouldn’t be turned away before he reached Shushma.

Suddenly he was at the front of the queue, standing before her. They exchanged eye contact, and he could already see surprise in Shushma’s eyes, which was just what he wanted. She glanced across at the priest, who was wearing a white lunghi bordered with green and gold, and a sacred thread slung diagonally across his bare chest. He was too busy with a big party of devotees to have noticed a foreigner apparently trying to talk his way into the shrine.

‘Sorry, Hindus only,’ Shushma said, in surprisingly good English. He remembered that she had worked at the British High Commission for a year. He studied her for a moment, tracing her features, thinking that his father had once looked into the same big eyes. She was undeniably beautiful. Marchant’s mother had never been a big influence in his life. If she had, he imagined he would feel some hostility towards the woman who had slept with his father and was standing before him now. Instead, he felt only warmth. And pity. Her small features had a filigree fragility about them.

‘You need to come with me, now,’ he said quietly. ‘Your life is in danger.’ Shushma dropped the candle she was holding. The yellow ghee spread out across the table. ‘Don’t be alarmed, please. I’m here to help you. Look at me.’

She fumbled with the spilt candle and slowly raised her eyes.

‘Who are you?’ she asked. Was there a flicker of recognition? Marchant detected a growing restlessness in the queue behind him.

‘I’m not with the police,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m Daniel, Stephen Marchant’s son.’